I feel like I have slack. I don’t need to work much to be able to eat; if I don’t work for a day, nothing viscerally bad happens in my immediate surrounding. This allows me to think longer term and take on altruistic projects. But on the other hand, I feel like every movement counts; that there’s no loose in the system. Every lost move is costly. A recurrent thought I’ve had in the past weeks is that: there’s no slack in the system.
Every move DOES count, and “nothing viscerally bad” doesn’t mean it wasn’t a lost opportunity for improvement. _on some dimensions_. The problem is that well-being is highly-dimensional, and we only have visibility into a few aspects, and measurements of only a subset of those. It could easily be a huge win on your future capabilities to not work-for-pay that day.
The Slack that can be described is not true Slack. Slack is in the mind. Slack is freedom FROM freedom. Slack is the knowledge that every action or inaction changes the course of the future, _AND_ that you control almost none of it. You don’t (and probably CAN’T) actually understand all the ways you’re affecting your future experiences. Simply give yourself room to try stuff and experience them, without a lot of stress about “causality” or “optimization”. But don’t fuck it up. True slack is the ability to obsess over plans and executions in order to pick the future you prefer, WHILE YOU SIMULTANEOUSLY know you’re wrong about causality and about your own preferences.
[ note and warning: my conception of slack has been formed over decades of Subgenius popehood (though I usually consider myself more Discordian), and may diverge significantly from other uses. ]
I feel like I have slack. I don’t need to work much to be able to eat; if I don’t work for a day, nothing viscerally bad happens in my immediate surrounding. This allows me to think longer term and take on altruistic projects. But on the other hand, I feel like every movement counts; that there’s no loose in the system. Every lost move is costly. A recurrent thought I’ve had in the past weeks is that: there’s no slack in the system.
Every move DOES count, and “nothing viscerally bad” doesn’t mean it wasn’t a lost opportunity for improvement. _on some dimensions_. The problem is that well-being is highly-dimensional, and we only have visibility into a few aspects, and measurements of only a subset of those. It could easily be a huge win on your future capabilities to not work-for-pay that day.
The Slack that can be described is not true Slack. Slack is in the mind. Slack is freedom FROM freedom. Slack is the knowledge that every action or inaction changes the course of the future, _AND_ that you control almost none of it. You don’t (and probably CAN’T) actually understand all the ways you’re affecting your future experiences. Simply give yourself room to try stuff and experience them, without a lot of stress about “causality” or “optimization”. But don’t fuck it up. True slack is the ability to obsess over plans and executions in order to pick the future you prefer, WHILE YOU SIMULTANEOUSLY know you’re wrong about causality and about your own preferences.
[ note and warning: my conception of slack has been formed over decades of Subgenius popehood (though I usually consider myself more Discordian), and may diverge significantly from other uses. ]